The Twitter online service previously has launched a so-called “Twitter Lists” feature that provides a way to organize the people that a person is following on the Twitter service. Twitter Lists are a “groups” feature and offer a way for a person to collect together other users on Twitter into groups so that the person can get an overview of what these other users are doing. These Twitter Lists are not static listings of users, but are curated Twitter streams of the latest tweets from a specified set of users.
A user can create a list that groups together people for whatever reason the user may decide (e.g., the members of the user's family), and then the user can get a snapshot of the things those other users are saying online by viewing the page for that particular list (i.e., the page for that specific Twitter List that the user created). This page includes a complete tweet stream for everyone on the list. These lists allow the user to organize the people the user is following into groups, and the lists allow the user to include people that the user is not following.
Because Twitter Lists create grouped tweet streams of the people that are on them, a user can use Lists to organize the user's tweets into groups based on anything the user desires. For example, a list of every employee at a company may be created. By viewing or following this company list, the user could easily see what all of the company's employees are tweeting about. The user can do the same thing with his or her co-workers, family, or friends, or just group Twitter users based on location, subject, or anything else the user may select.
When a user follows a Twitter List, the user is not actually following every user on the list, but is following the entire list—those users' tweets aren't added to the user's main stream. The user can then visit that list and view its tweet stream. This is why the user can also use Lists to follow people without really following them. For example, if there are users whose tweets a user would like to follow, but whom the user does not necessarily want in his or her main Twitter stream (e.g., they tweet too often for a user's personal liking), the user can add them to a list and then check up on their latest tweets every once in a while by viewing the user's list.